Symlinks are ignored when publishing to a hosted pub repository

[maxwellpeterson-wf]

We have a package that supplies most of our common frontend styling - SASS, CSS, icons, fonts, etc.

This repository existed long before we started using Dart, so most of the code is in top-level directories like sass/ and dist/. When using the package as a github dependency we were able to symlink some the necessary directories into lib/. These symlinks persist upon download/git clone, and everything works great.

However, when we publish the package to our new hosted private pub repository, the symlinks do not make it into the tar archive which means we get a mostly empty lib/ directory and cannot use our static assets.

It seems as though an option could be used with the tar command to include the symlinks before uploading it to the pub repository server.

@nex3 @trentgrover-wf @greglittlefield-wf

[aaronlademann-wf]

For reference, our new hosted private pub repository - as a result of #1335 being closed.

[nex3]

I'm fine with passing an option to tar to fold in symlinks. Can you folks figure out how to do so in a cross-platform way? GNU tar often has different options than the BSD tar that Mac OS uses, and on Windows we use 7zip which is entirely different.

[greglittlefield-wf]

Just tested the latest 7zip on Windows, and it looks like it follows symlinks the way we want, by default! This issue likely only exists on non-Windows systems.

Looks like OS X's BSD tar also supports the same -h "dereferencing" flag that @maxwellpeterson-wf linked to in GNU tar, so that seems like a viable approach.

[aaronlademann-wf]

Thanks for the fix @nex3 !!!